5 Step Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Business

It can be daunting to think about creating a digital marketing strategy for your business or brand. Your area of expertise is your business and entering the digital world can seem scary from the outside. However, as we always say at Digidol, digital marketing is only as difficult as you make it.

The number one rule of digital marketing is to have a strategy. If you don’t have a strategy then how do you know your efforts are working or that you’re spending your valuable time in the right places?

On the other hand, you might be thinking what on earth is a digital marketing strategy? At Digidol, we have put together this quick 5-step guide on how to make a digital marketing strategy for your small business.

Step 1: Set a Clear Goal

How do you know that your digital marketing is successful if you don’t know what success is? A clear goal gives you something clear to focus on which can help you plan your content and also use measurement metrics in order to see whether you have reached the level of exposure you want.

For example, if you want to launch a new product to your existing customer base you may run an email campaign alongside a social media product launch announcement.

If you set easy to measure goals such as the number of emails opened or post interactions, you can then easily determine whether the campaign was effective or not. If it wasn’t effective and only reached 20% of your followers, you know you need to do something different – or, simply continue promoting the new product to reach your whole audience.

You can also take this one step further and work out the conversation rate of these interactions or inquiries, which allows you to measure the actual financial return of the campaign.

Step 2: Know Your Audience

You may think that you know exactly who your audience is, but can you really group your whole audience into one category? It is more likely that you will have 4 or 5 different segments that your customers will fall into. So, be sure to mix up your content to reach your different audience groups and keep building your amazing business-customer relationship.

One easy exercise you can do to help with this is to attach a persona to each of your different groups and look at what content would attract them. For example, we worked with our client LMD Nutrition in order to make 3 distinct client groups: individuals wanting a healthier lifestyle, individuals wanting to lose weight and individuals who wanted to enhance their sporting performance. Each of these groups then had a persona created for them and now their social content is varied to hit all of these groups.

Step 3: Promote Your Unique Selling Point

You eat, sleep and breathe your business. You do things in a special way and those unique selling points are why customers choose you over your competitors. Doing things in that particular way is your brand and that’s what makes you successful – so don’t be modest about them.

Remind your customer base of why they fell in love with your brand in the first place. Whether you’re a family run business, you only use local produce or your business is carbon neutral, make sure that your customers remember.

At Digidol, our unique selling point is that we provide affordable digital marketing to small businesses and help make the world of digital marketing accessible for them. We also work extremely closely with every single one of our clients, who have the reassurance that we are only a phone call away if they have any questions. This personal and bespoke service is why people choose to use Digidol to help them build their business.

That is why every week we give out free digital marketing tips for small businesses on social media with easy-to-follow actionable tips. The reason we do this is to show small businesses that doing little things can make a big difference and we can help them make digital marketing simple.

Step 4: Keep an Eye on the Market

We started writing this guide with Step 4 as ‘keep an eye on the competition’, but it can actually be a whole lot more than that. The best part about this step is that you can easily adapt it into your normal routine by simply following other brands on social media.

Obviously, keep an eye on the competition. It is important to stay aware of what they are doing in the market. But also follow a range of different brands that you like (and don’t like) to see how they market themselves online. This is a great way to see what works and what doesn’t when it comes to social media marketing. We actively encourage our clients to take a look around and look at other businesses’ digital marketing efforts and analyse them from a critical point of view.

Step 5: It’s Not Over till the Fat Lady Measures

We are all guilty of rewarding ourselves after that glorious moment when we press send and watch our newly created campaign enter the world. However, your work is not finished. Analysing the campaign allows you to properly message the success of the campaign and provides invaluable insight into what worked (and sometimes more importantly) what did not. This is especially important in any paid advertising, as you can measure your return on investment.

Social media platforms and email marketing tools make it so easy to see your analytics and measure your success – so do it. Take a look at which of your posts got the most interaction or which of your marketing emails were opened by your clients. Finally, use this information to help you plan your next campaign to be even better.

If you are interested in finding out more about the digital presence of your business and how it can be improved, get in touch with us at Digidol for a FREE 1-Hour Consultation!